The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (28 page)

When she had gone, I looked round. I was in a large, low-ceilinged room that was obviously bedroom, study and sitting-room combined. It was after eight o’clock: the rays of the setting sun came in through the large horizontal windows, and caught the dust floating in the air. I looked at the furniture: the divan, half bed andhalfsofa, with a large white pillow at thehead, and a cheap, shoddy, red-flowered counterpane on the rest ofit; the black Moorish-style table, between the divan and the room’s single armchair, of fake leather, on which I was sitting; the fake-parchment lampshades strewn about; the white telephone that smirked flirtatiously on the glum black of a shabby, legal-looking desk, all drawers; the ghastly little oil paintings on the walls: and although I thought Giampi had a pretty good cheek turning up his nose at Alberto’s modern furniture (how could he, being such an old moralizer, and such a stern judge of everyone else, be so lenient with himself and his own stuff?), all at once, my heart suddenly wrenched by the thought ofMicol-it wasjust as if she’d been there, pressing it with her hand-1 made a solemn resolution again to be good with Malnate, not to argue with him, not to quarrel. When she heard of it, Micol would take it into account, too.

The siren of one of the sugar factories at Pontelago-scuro wailed in the distance. Immediately afterwards, a heavy footstep scrunched on the gravel outside.

The judge’s voice sounded very close beyond the wall.

“Oh, Doctor,” he said, in his noticeably nasal voice, “there’s a friend waiting for you indoors.”

“A friend?” said Malnate. “Who is it?”

“Go along in . . .’ said Lalumia encouragingly. “I just said a friend.”

Tall and fat, taller and fatter than ever, perhaps because of the effect of the low ceiling, Malnate came in.

“Not really!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide with surprise as he adjusted his glasses on his nose.

He shook my hand vigorously, and slapped me on the back several times, and it was very odd, as he’d always been against me ever since we first met, to find him so friendly, thoughtful, and chatty. Why on earth? I wondered, in confusion. Had he also decided to change his ways, with regard to me? Maybe. In any case now, on his own ground, he was no longer the argumentative tough I’d so often fought with under the observant eye of Alberto, and later of Micol. As soon as I saw him I knew that away from the Finzi-Continis (and to think that just recently our rows had got really hurting, we’d almost come to blows!) every reason for quarrelling was destined to melt away, like mist in sunshine.

Malnate was talking, meantime: incredibly chatty and cordial. He asked me if I’d met the owner of the house when I crossed the garden, and if he’d been polite. I said yes, I’d met him, and laughingly described the scene.

“Well, that’s a good job.”

He went on telling me about the judge and his wife, giving me no time to say I’d met the wife as well. They were very nice people, he said, but a bit of a bore the way they both kept trying to protect him from the snares and perils of the big world. Though he was firmly anti-fascist (he was a roaring monarchist), his honour didn’t want any trouble, and was continuously on edge in case Malnate, whom he said he’d sniffed out as just about the likeliest future client for the Special Tribunal, secretly brought dangerous types along: expolitical prisoners, people watched by the police, subversives of any kind. Signora Edvige was always on the hop as well, spending the whole day perched up behind the gaps in the first-floor shutters, or turning up at the door at the most hair-raising hours, or even at night, after she’d heard him come in. But she was worried about other things. Like a good Ferrarese-because she came from Ferrara, maiden name Santini-she knew what she knew, as she put it-which meant the local women, married and unmarried. According to her, a young man on his own, a stranger with a degree and a flat with its own front door, might just be ruined at Ferrara, his backbone turned to
oss boeucc*
by the girls. So what had he done? Well, he’d always done his best to reassure her, of course. But it was quite obvious, signora Lalumia’d only calm down when she’d turned him into a dreary little lodger trailing about in his vest, pyjama pants and slippers, his nose poked into the kitchen saucepans.

“Well, why not?” I objected. “I’ve often heard you grousing about restaurants and eating places.”

“That’s true,” he admitted, amazingly docile: and his docility never ceased to surprise me. “It’s no good, is it? Freedom’s all very fine, but if you don’t put the brakes on somewhere” (and as he said this he winked) “where are you going to end up ?”

It was beginning to get dark. Malnate got up from the divan where he’d been lying, turned on the light *
Osso buco
: Milanese dialect.

and then went on into the bathroom. He felt he needed a shave, he said from the bathroom. Would I wait while he did it? Then we’d go out together.

And so we carried on talking, he in the bathroom, I in the bedroom.

He said he’d been at the Finzi-Continis’s that afternoon, and in fact had just come from there. They had played for over two hours: first he and Micol, then he and Alberto, and finally the three of them together. Did I like playing American?

“Not much,” I replied.

“I can see why,” he said. “A decent player like you can’t see much sense in it. But it’s fun.”

“Who won?”

“The American game?”

“Yes.”

“Micol, ofcourse!” sniggered Malnate. “There’sjust no stopping her. Even on the court she’s a real streak of lightning. ...”

He asked me why I hadn’t appeared for some days. What had happened, had I been away?

Remembering how Micol had told me no one believed it when I said I’d been on a journey, every time I stayed away, I said that I’d got fed up, that often, just recently, I’d had a feeling I wasn’t welcome, and especially that Micol didn’t want me there, so I’d decided to keep my distance for a bit.

“What are you talking about!” said Malnate. “Micol’s got nothing against you. Are you sure you’re not mistaken?”

“Quite sure. ’ ’

“Oh well,” he sighed.

He said no more, and I was silent too. A little later he appeared at the bathroom door, shaved and smiling.

He saw me examining the hideous pictures hanging on the walls.

“Well, what d’you think of my little den?” he said. “You haven’t told me what you think of it.”

He was grinning in his old way, waiting to catch me out, but at the same time, I could read in his eyes, he had made up his mind to keep his temper.

“I envy you, honestly,” I said. “I’ve always dreamed ofhaving something of my own like this.”

He gave me a pleased, grateful look. Then he said that of course he too realized the Lalumias’ limitations in matters of taste in furniture. But their taste, so typical of the lower middle classes (“which aren’t the backbone of the nation for nothing,” he added parenthetically), had something alive and vital and healthy about it; very likely in direct ratio to its own banality and vulgarity.

“After all, objects are nothing but objects,” he exclaimed. “Why make yourself a slave of them?”

Take Alberto, now-he went on-holy smoke! By surrounding himself with things that were perfect, exquisite, unflawed, he too would some day end up becoming . . .

He went across to the door, without finishing what he was saying.

“How is he?” I asked.

I had got up myself and joined him at the door.

“Who, Alberto?” he said, startled.

I nodded.

“Well yes,” I said. “He’s seemed a bit run down, lately. Don’t you think so? I’ve got a feeling he’s not well.”

Malnate shrugged, then put out the light. He went ahead of me in the darkness, and said no more till we reached the gate, except to answer signora Lalumia’s “Good evening” from a window on the way, and, right at the gate, to suggest I had supper with him, at 
Giovanni’s.

It was no good deluding myself, Malnate knew perfectly well why I was staying away from the Finzi-Continis’, just as he knew, at least to some extent, what point relations between Micol and me had reached. But both of us steered clear of the subject, in our talk, both being unusually reserved and delicate. And I was sincerely grateful to him for pretending to believe what I had told him the first evening, and never referring to it again: grateful to him for playing along with me and supporting me in it.

We met very often, nearly every evening. Since the beginning ofJune, the suddenly stifling heat had emptied the town. Usually it was I who went to his house, between seven and eight. When he was out I waited patiently, sometimes entertained by chat with signora Edvige. But generally I found him there already, alone, wearing his vest and lying on the divan, staring up at the ceiling, hands crossed at the back of his neck; or else sitting writing to his mother, to whom, I discovered, he was united by a deep, rather exaggerated affection. But as soon as I arrived he hurried into the bathroom for his shave, after which we went out, as it was understood we were to have supper together.

As a rule we went to
Giovanni’s,
sitting outside, opposite the castle towers that beetled above us like crags in the Dolomites, and touched at the peaks, like them, by the waning daylight; or else to the
Voltini, 
a cheap restaurant outside Porta Reno from the tables of which, in a row under a light arcade facing south across the open countryside, you could then see right across to the vast expanse of the airport. But on the hottest evenings, instead of going into town, we would go along the fine Pontelagoscuro road, cross the iron bridge over the river, and pedal side by side along the towpath, with the river on our right, and the Venetian countryside on our left, until, after another quarter of an hour, we reached the great isolated building of the Dogana Vecchia, now famous for fried eel, half-way between Pontelagoscuro and Polesella. We always ate very slowly. We would stay on at the table until late, drinking Lambrusco and light wine from Bosco, and smoking our pipes. But when we ate anywhere in town, at a certain point we laid down our napkins, paid our own bills, and then, wheeling our bicycles, walked up and down Giovecca, or along the viale Cavour as far as the station (Corso Ercole I we always avoided, in these night wanderings of ours). And it was he, then, generally about midnight, who offered to see me home. He would glance at the clock and say it was bedtime (the factory sirens sounded at eight for them, the ‘‘technical staff”, admittedly, but it still meant getting up at seven !) and however hard I pressed him to let me take him home instead, he simply refused to allow it. My last sight of him was always the same: half-way along the street he would sit astride his bike and wait for me to shut the street door on him.

After we had eaten on two or three evenings, we ended up on the bastions at Porta Reno, where, in the open space, flanked by the gasometer on one side, and by piazza Travaglio on the other, a fairground had been set up that summer. It was only a cheap one, half a dozen shooting booths round the patched grey toadstool of a small circus tent. I was drawn to the place, drawn and moved by its usual melancholy crowd of poor prostitutes and young louts and soldiers, and wretched suburban homosexuals. I quoted Apollinaire, Ungaretti. And although Malnate, looking faintly reluctant, accused me of “cheap decadentism”, in his heart he too enjoyed going up to the dusty piazzale after supper at the
Voltini,
pausing to eat a slice of melon by the acetylene lamp of the water-melon man, or to put in a half-hour’s shooting at the booths. An excellent shot, Giampi was. Tall and stout and elegant in the well-pressed cream linen jacket I had seen him wearing since the beginning of summer, and very calmly taking aim through his thick tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, he had obviously taken the fancy of the coarse, painted Tuscan girl-a kind of queen of the castle-at whose booth, the moment we appeared at the top of the stone staircase leading from piazza Travoglio to the top of the bastions, we were imperiously invited to stop. While Malnate was shooting the girl kept up a flow of sarcastic compliments with an undercurrent of obscenity, which he answered with a great deal of spirit, using the familiar “
tu
”, and with the easy and to me inimitable casualness of a man who has spent long hours in brothels as a youngster.

One particularly sultry evening in August we landed up instead at an open-air cinema, where I remember they were showing a German film with Cristina Soder-baum. When we went in, the film had already started, and as soon as we sat down I started whispering ironical comments without paying attention to Malnate, who kept telling me to be careful, not to
bausciare*
*
 
“To make a row”: Milanese dialect
 
that in any case it just wasn’t worth it. And he was quite right. A fellow in the row in front of ours, suddenly jumping to his feet against the milky background of the screen, threateningly told me to shut up. I retorted with an insult, and he shouted back:
“Fora, boiad’unebrei
!”f 
. t “Get out, you filthy Jew”: Ferrarese dialect. 
and flung himself on me, grabbing my neck. It was lucky for me that Malnate, without a word, was ready to hurl my assailant back into his seat, and drag me out by the arm before the lights went up again.